BOOKS -- Detective Deals With Hatred in `Alley'

APPARITION ALLEY

By
Katherine V. Forrest Berkley
; 248 pages; $21.95
At the outset of "Apparition Alley" by San Francisco writer Katherine V. Forrest, Los Angeles homicide detective
Kate Delafield
is shot in the shoulder during a routine drug arrest and relegated to administrative leave.

She's also sent for mandatory psychological counseling -- an experience she hates -- and receives annoying and baffling calls from the press. To further complicate her return to duty, a cop with a bad reputation asks her to speak in his defense when he is investigated for shooting an unarmed civilian.

Things are not going well for Kate, but she's tough and resilient. As readers of the five previous Kate Delafield mysteries know, she's an ex-Marine who's spent time in Vietnam, and she's been on the police force in homicide for 14 years. Kate is not one to spend her recovery time in bed.

Before long, injured arm and administrative leave notwithstanding, Kate is caught up in a mystery that starts with a confusing incident -- a shooting in a squalid place called Apparition Alley -- and develops into a case with the potential to rock the entire police department, to say nothing of her own psyche, which is severely tested. In her years as a detective she's seen a lot of ugly things, and she's kept them to herself. "My job isn't anything anyone would thank me for sharing," she says when LAPD therapist Calla Dearborn asks whether she talks to her friends about her job.

Kate has also kept very much to herself the fact that she's a lesbian. She lives with her partner, Aimee. The lesbian Nightwood Bar is the place where she feels most comfortable, but she keeps her work life and her private life separate.

"I mind my own business, I get along with everybody just fine," Kate tells Dearborn.

"But you pay a big price in isolation," the therapist replies.

These aren't issues Kate wants to consider. She's interested in finding out why Luke Taggart -- the cop who's accused of murder -- has chosen her as his "defense rep," and why he seems to be telling her lies. Soon she realizes that what went on in Apparition Alley is the least of her worries. Taggart is pointing a finger at the virulent streak of homophobia in the LAPD; he thinks his partner was killed because of it, and he wants Kate to find out the truth.

This forces Kate to take a hard look at her own motivations as well as those of the people implicated in the dark doings of the plot. She's no gay-rights crusader, and when Dr. Dearborn asks about her private life, she flinches. As Forrest puts it: "If she revealed anything of a nature that led this psychologist to believe she was in any degree unfit to perform, something would go in her file, and hell would freeze over before she could regain credibility with her supervisors, before she could lift the cloud of suspicion over her job and her performance." How Kate works through her conflicting emotions is as intriguing as how she solves the mystery.

Forrest makes Kate into an appealing and plausible character, especially when she's wrestling with her own issues. Others, including Aimee, who works as a paralegal, are less three-dimensional, although a few are memorable.

For example, there's Detective Mussino, to whom Kate goes for information and who expresses his contempt for gays, women, Mexican Americans (and by implication any one not white and male) in the grossest of terms.

It's unnerving to think that such talk might go on in the LAPD, though given what was revealed during the O.J. Simpson case, to which Forrest refers several times, it's not beyond belief. In "Apparition Alley," Forrest gives her readers a good combination of plot and thought. In both categories, the ending of the story provides a satisfying surprise.